[Nottingham] LAN Party! Sunday 18th Feb

[Martin]

Martin wrote:
> Folks,
> 
> Reminder for this *Sunday*
> 
> 
>> Get yer wires and hackings and fraggings together for this Sunday and:
>>
>> We have a LAN Party :-)
>> ===================
> 
> Broadband internet kindly donated by Ineedbroadband
> http://ineedbroadband.co.uk/
> 
>>>> Sunday 18th Feb 2007,
>>>>
>>>> High Noon until late,
[---]
> http://www.nottingham.lug.org.uk/node/122

Folks,

Another good fun do although a little mixed for myself.

MartinG's WiFi widget saved the day as ever and the Ineedbroadband
connection worked flawlessly.

Unfortunately, my file server died. Instead, Penfold's laptop was
pressed into service for NAT duties and the rest of us just had to dream
up whatever IP number we wanted.

For my story of woes for the day:

One of the big disks in my file server failed to spin-up upon power-up.
Taking the PC covers off revealed that it would do the spin-up "n" times
attempt and then fail with various (head seek) clicks of death. Very
dead and half my backups lost. :-( :-(

And upon my return, I've discovered that my car now has a very flat
tyre. :-(

Meanwhile, we had some new faces and an infrequently seen face turn up
for a while. Roger accosted anyone in sight for gpg signing to populate
a web-of-trust. I meandered through a manual Gentoo install and
discovered the true wonders of chroot! Various bits of kit were
exchanged. And various other hackings were done.

But no LAN games!

Various people brought in 10m of ethernet cable that Ed completely
forgot to ask about and we all forgot to mention!

Jonathan picked up a Sun box to play with. (Keyboard goes later...)

Thanks to flibble for the WON cable. It's in place on my backup server
but not tried in anger yet until...

I've put a replacement disk into my backup server and so far its run
through most of a badblocks test without error. Its a big disk on an old
P3 machine so it'll probably not finish until tomorrow. Then to rerun
the lost backups. Here's hoping no more disk failures before that completes!

And here's an interesting paper on disk failures:
http://216.239.37.132/papers/disk_failures.pdf
from the disk farm people at Google.


Still a good fun day and a good few hints and tips picked up.

Special note: Must make a note of the commandline  commands for setting
up NAT on a box!


Cheers All,
Martin

-- 
----------------
Martin Lomas
martin at ml1.co.uk
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